Dance of the Happy Shades

any of their neighbours.
    My mother also said that it had been a great mistake to let me go out with boys and that I would not be going out again until well after my sixteenth birthday, if then. This did not prove to be a concrete hardship at all, because it was at least that long before anybody asked me. If you think that news of the Berrymans adventure would put me in demand for whatever gambols and orgies were going on in and around that town, you could not be more mistaken. The extraordinary publicity which attended my first debauch may have made me seemed marked for a special kind of ill luck, like the girl whose illegitimate baby turns out to be triplets: nobody wants to have anything to do with her. At any rate I had at the same time one of the most silent telephones and positively the most sinful reputation in the whole High School. I had to put up with this until the next fall, when a fat blonde girl in Grade Ten ran away with a married man and was picked up two months later, living in sin—though not with the same man—in the city of Sault Ste. Marie. Then everybody forgot about me.
    But there was a positive, a splendidly unexpected, result of this affair: I got completely over Martin Collingwood. It was not only that he at once said, publicly, that he had always thought I was a nut; where he was concerned I had no pride, and my tender fancy could have found a way around that, a month, a week, before. What was it that brought me back into the world again? It was the terrible and fascinating reality of my disaster; it was
the way things happened
. Not that I enjoyed it; I was a self-conscious girl and I suffered a good deal from all this exposure. But the development of events on that Saturday night—that fascinated me; I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity withwhich the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised. I could not take my eyes off it.
    And of course Martin Collingwood wrote his Senior Matric that June, and went away to the city to take a course at a school for Morticians, as I think it is called, and when he came back he went into his uncle’s undertaking business. We lived in the same town and we would hear most things that happened to each other but I do not think we met face to face or saw one another, except at a distance, for years. I went to a shower for the girl he married, but then everybody went to everybody else’s showers. No, I do not think I really saw him again until I came home after I had been married several years, to attend a relative’s funeral. Then I saw him; not quite Mr. Darcy but still very nice-looking in those black clothes. And I saw him looking over at me with an expression as close to a reminiscent smile as the occasion would permit, and I knew that he had been surprised by a memory either of my devotion or my little buried catastrophe. I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.

THE TIME OF DEATH
    Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on. Leona drank some tea and refused to eat, and talked, beginning like this, in a voice that was ragged and insistent but not yet hysterical: I wasn’t hardly out of the house, I wasn’t out of the house twenty minutes—
    (Three-quarters of an hour at the least, Allie McGee thought, but she did not say so, not at the time. But she remembered, because there were three serials on the radio she was trying to listen to, she listened to every day, and she couldn’t get half of them; Leona was there in her kitchen going on about Patricia. Leona was sewing this cowgirl outfit for Patricia on Allie’s machine; she raced the machine and she pulled the thread straight out to break it instead of pulling it back though Allie had told her don’t do that please it’s liable to break the needle. Patricia was supposed to have the outfit for that night when she sang at a concert up the valley; she was singing Western pieces. Patricia sang with the Maitland Valley Entertainers, who went all over the country playing at concerts and dances. Patricia was introduced as the Little Sweetheart of Maitland Valley, the Baby Blonde, the Pint-Size Kiddie with the Great Big Voice. She did have a big voice, almost alarming in so frail a child.Leona had started her singing in